Coopers not for sale
After successfully fighting a hostile takeover bid from Lion Nathan in 2005, Mr Cooper said the company’s 129 shareholders are unlikely to be won over by international brewers. “Other brewers can’t justify spending too much on a company like ours, and with due diligence the amount they can reasonably offer isn’t enough to sway the vast majority of our shareholders,” he argued. “Any international players will know what happened in 2005 and that will hopefully deter them from trying to take us on again – it does take up a lot of management time and costs a lot of money to fight them off.”
2010 was a great year for Australian beer lovers. While the range and variety of premium and craft beers grew exponentially, traditional beer brands, such as VB (Foster’s) and XXXX (Lion Nathan), continued to lose ground despite heavy discounting.
Beer sales fell to a 60-year low in 2010, but wine consumption remained fairly steady. After criticism from analysts, Foster’s admitted that it has failed to “refresh” its established beer brands, as younger drinkers switch to imported premium beers and local craft beers.
Foster’s and Lion Nathan have stuck with the same, mass male market, which is much more fragmented now and much more discerning in its taste.
At the same time, microbreweries (those producing less than 30,000 litres a year) still only account for 1 percent of the total market and are constrained by a punitive tax regime. This is a sore point for many small brewers trying to earn a living from selling beer.
